Currently Listening Silent Hill, Vol. 2 By Original Game Soundtrack see related

Blood Draw

You watch it slide slowly away from you in vibrant ribbons, surging and pausing like a tentative infant’s crawl. Slowly but deliberately it traverses the distance between us, until it hangs for a moment at a point equally distant from you as it is near to me. It is suspended; unsure of to whom it belongs, measuring the familiarity from whence it came against the allure of a new and unknown current. For a moment, it is motionless in stalemate. Your silent will calls it back just as mine calls it forth.

But the pressure behind it builds, a living gravity compels it, and in a moment it rushes forward again. It streams in twisting lines down glass walls, to spill and pool in the chalice I hold in my hands. There, as its level rises and its temperature falls, it turns dark as if with decay and death for leaving you.

As it disappears into my closed hand, do you not think as I do, upon my dominion and your own vulnerability?

You trust me even as you grimace.

You smile at me even as you squirm.

You willingly give to me even as I take.

Do you stop for even a second and wonder to what end I deplete you? What is my will that would leave you dry?

When I came into the room to stand above you, did you wonder at my experience? You lie prostrate and expose for me your most bountiful of vessels. You bend at the wrist and I stare at skin that may have been meant once for a lover’s lips. But I see right through its paper thin grace. I sit at your side, a needle in my fingers and thoughts.

As I kneel at your side, you are confident in my ability. You are assured of my technique.

And yet, like the withering of grass or the cracking of earth, my appearance is a harbinger of drought for you.

But it is a drought that you will quietly endure. For me.

As I wrap and choke your limb tightly, its most peripheral of rivers begin to surge in protest, do you wonder if I would allow you to do the same of me? Such an intimate exchange that now takes place between you and I, surely the faith is reciprocal.

I tell you, I would not.

I would not let another take a single drop of me.

I would not willingly watch my own living substance be transformed into sterile numbers another professes to have more meaning than I do right now, unpierced, unopened. Know that the trust you place in me, is completely unfounded. 

For neither you nor I fully understand what it is I take from you. We say it is simply blood; that the volume I remove is so insignificant, so easily replaced by the very deep core that runs within your bones. And yet, perhaps a passing memory is caught between the cells and liquid that I draw into my needle. I picture you, some day many years from now, sitting alone in a room lit by a solitary lamp, your gnarled fingers loosely grasped around a glass of dark wine you drink alone. For seeming hours, you try to recall a thought of a distant child happiness or the grace of a loved one. You blink frequently as if to squeeze the memory from the dried sponge of your brain.  But it is never to be retrieved again. It had long ago been drawn out of you. I carried it away from you for a time in a glass tube until it could be converted into a number. And then, when we determined it to be of a completely unremarkable value, indistinguishable and un-alarming, we threw it away amongst shards of broken glass.   

I am frightened by the power I have to hurt you.

And I will tell you a secret.

You mistake purpose for knowledge.

I am not good at this.

Despite confidence smoothed like lotion across my skin, I am frightened by what I have been sent here to do.
Just as the skin of your wrist itches and retreats in fear of the instant it meets my needle, so does the hand that guides it fear the very same moment of union. 

Just as your heart beats faster to make up for the volume I take from you, so too does mine quicken in the act of taking it.

For I have tried before but I have failed every time.

Their defenses were too hard.

Or mine were too soft.

I stare at the seams that make up your skin and pray for them to part just enough to let me in with ease.

I, more than you, wish that this could be done differently.

I would ask your own pools to bubble to the surface, like the waters of well irrigated lands after the rain. I would walk in them, submerged to my knees, and simply reach down and fill the cup of my fingers.  I would raise them to my lips and taste of you and all that you were and are. And you would do the same of me, a mutual transfusion of our separate and sick lives, a donation of each other’s strength which renews us both.

But it is not to be.

It is simply me.

And it is simply my needle.

As my finger draws the skin of your wrist tight to expose your most vibrant of vessels,

Let us both quietly pray that we find the strength for this.

Currently Listening V Is for Vagina By Puscifer see related

Momentum

            The movement of my body propels my idle mind. Motion gives my thoughts a momentum that I am powerless to oppose. 

As I look out the window at the moving landscape, I think of how artists and architects say that all lines converge in a distant point on the horizon. Why then does it seem as if they all converge not at the farthest reaches of my eye, but instead within it? There, in the dark point in the center of my pupil they set off a chain reaction of introspection to which I feel only a passive observer.

When I travel, I endure a journey of the mind that often proves far more taxing. It does not matter if I am transported by car, train, or by plane. I need not even be at the wheel. As I wait in my seat for my origin to recede and my destination to approach, I am alone with my memories, my hopes and regrets.

I travel the lines that connect them all. I stare sadly in the places where they never met but should have. Or where they intersected despite all my will set against it. What could have been curls into fetal position in the shadow of what is.

            Alone and at the wheel of my car, I look into the rear-view window and see the empty back seats. Oh, how I long for the days when I was small and they were mine. I look at the space where the seatbelt approaches the window and I wish to lay my head there in naïve sleep. But with my growing years, those who would drive for me while I slumber have dwindled. Those who will steer while I play I Spy with my little sister are no longer here. Nor is she. And so I must drive forward while looking backward. And the thoughts begin to have their way.  I turn up the radio to drown them before they drown me.

            By bus or by train, there is even less reprieve. I squirm in my seat as I stare out the window at the passing canopies and wish for them to go faster. The memories come slowly, one by one, without urgency. They know I have no control over the speed with which I might flee from them. Someone else is at the wheel. It is someone else whose steady foot limits my escape. And so I close my eyes and let them come. I have no other choice than to revisit all of them.  At journey’s end, the door opens and I descend from the vehicle weary and shaken. I cannot bear the thought of the inevitable return trip home.

            Travel by air brings me no more levity. Why is it that when I sit above the clouds in flight, I have never before felt the burden of such gravity on earth? Up here, lifted to a distance where my world has shrunken to a harmless scale, I should feel such a lightness of being, my greatest challenges put in their trivial little place as so insignificant as to be unnoticed by my eye.  And yet, every plane ride is not truly an ascent, is it? It is an arch, an inevitable parabola where my descent to the ground is an absolute law. One way or another, it will come. Gravity does not tire, it’s patience is eternal. And when I come back down, they will all be waiting for me, eager for my attention, demanding pieces of me. Sometimes I wish that my return to earth will not be the latter limb of the parabola so much as the sudden and finite angle of a perpendicular line.

            But by foot…

Intuitively, that journey might be the most oppressive of all, perhaps because it is the one that travels most closely to the earth. It appears to be the means of least velocity.

And yet, while a journey on foot cannot reach the speeds of an automobile or the altitude of a jet, its confinement to the capacity of my body is simultaneously its greatest limitation and precisely the means by which it liberates me.

Walking. We are designed for such a simple task. We are not meant to think about what we must do to ambulate. One foot before the other, the extension of the weight bearing leg coupled with the relaxation and swing of its opposite. Without a thought, without a falter, we move. In this way, we carry our own weight with us wherever we are bound.

And so, as I stroll down an empty street, my worries and fears emerge from the alleys and shadows, just as they do on any other journey. They close in behind me and match my pace to stare at the back of my head, slowly boring their way through. But as I feel the impact of memories in my mind, I match them with the impact of the street in my knees and so neutralize them. In the passenger seat of a bus or the driver’s seat of a car, I move but I am motionless. I am naked. My fears and anxieties have greatest reign over an undefended mind.

But when it is only my legs that carry me, I have control. As my thoughts quicken, so, too, do I. I soon find that my arms swing up at my side. My strides lengthen, putting distance between me and my past. For an instant each cycle, neither foot is on the ground. And now, I run.

As I feel my esophagus begin to close in the grip of my thoughts, I accelerate and thereby force it back open with an increased current of hot air into the bellows in my chest. As my head begins to sag with the weight of its contents, I increase my momentum and the jolt causes it to snap upright. I drown the rising dissonance in my mind with the pounding of increased blood in my temples.

My racing thoughts now race to keep up with me.

But they do not have my stamina. I can see their shadows reaching outward from behind me, crowding the path before me. I can hear their feet; there is the gallop of  unfinished responsibilities falling behind the canter of family dropping away from the stride of my lost loves. My career crashes along the side of the road and takes my childhood with it. They all collapse together in a smoldering wreck just as they had hoped to leave me.  I outrun them all.

And still I push harder. My joints slide and my tendons shudder. There is the smell of smoke in my nose and I imagine it comes from the burning in my legs. Heat  builds in me as I begin to blur and my fibers begin to curl like wheat set aflame. The acid in my blood is building and travels upwards, from my deepest vessel to flood the chambers of my mind. It reaches deep into the gray and there, dissolves the substance that seeks to haunt me.

And now,

I am no longer thought.

                        I am reduced to merely matter.

                                                And that too begins to flake and ember.

                                                And that too peels away.

And what is left behind is only energy.

And I am velocity.

                                                            And I am momentum.

                                                            And I am lines converging on the horizon.

                                                                                    And I am free.

Currently Listening The Pursuit Begins When This Portrayal Of Life Ends By Evans Blue see related

Reverie

I am 29 years old and I am a fantasy.

I am a daydream of myself.

A thought of a wish within a reverie.

      Many times each day, I leave this place. Many times I return.

      I am faster than the sleeping movements of your eye.

      It can happen in the middle of a sentence or a thought. Perhaps it might occur mid-stride as I lumber down a long, stale hallway. I can feel it coming in my chest. There is an almost imperceptible lengthening of the space between beats.  My heart fills but suddenly does not empty. Instead, it overflows and a ripple passes over the world, the slightest wave rolling over shallow waters. I hold my breath and wait for it to crash over me.

And then I am a pilot, focusing all of my will into a barrel roll, out of the stream of machine gun fire coming down on me. I throw all of my strength into the flight stick. Suddenly I drop out of the sky. His head rolls about his neck as he seeks desperately for me. As a bead of his sweat falls down his face, I rise up behind him. I smile and I fire. His explosion blinds and fills me.

A shimmer and I am a silent assassin in medieval japan. I feel moonlight wrapped about my skin, I taste steel against my tongue as I gaze down from a rooftop at my prey. There is almost inhuman grace rolling throughout my limbs. My every movement is poetry, his death will be beautiful. The shadows and his blood warm me and I melt into them.

The smoke parts and I am holding two children closely to my chest as I race them out of a burning wreck that was their home. I can feel their hot breath against my shirt where it condenses with their tears and my sweat to soak me. My lungs feel charred and I cough to rid them of ash. Just when I feel the fibers of my nerves begin to curl into blackened ember, I burst forth through the window and into the arms of onlookers.  The children hug and kiss my neck and I feel my knees give way. I am awed by my own bravery. I feel myself begin to cry for the glory of it all. I was merely a passer-by. Now, I am a hero. I feel their hands reach for me, raise me up, carry me. They love me and I feel myself swell.

And then my heart stops holding its breath and beats once more. The ripple fades and I am back with you. I silently clench my fist and tighten the muscles of my forearms.  I am stronger now. I am more powerful, more invulnerable and I may carry on. You are never the wiser. No one is.

            But today I wish you could see as I do. I wish you could hold your breath with me and see the beauty of yellow hospital walls suddenly peeling away to reveal the deep green canopy of a forest I am racing through. The dissonant sounds of respirators shift into the melodic whistle of arrows landing with a thick thud into nearby trees. Then your eyes would catch motion. You think it to be the most nimble of fauna, or the swiftest of birds that is their quarry. No.

   It is me.

           Your eyes would strain to grasp the precision with which I move between them. You would marvel at how each one draws closer than the last to my face or my chest, until you cannot bare to watch anymore. You would shield your eyes and I would smile. You fear for me. I laugh at the thought. It is them you should fret for.

           Look and see how I turn suddenly and reach out. Imagine how the sunlight reflects in beads of moisture cast out by my sprawling fingers. They swirl in the steamy air like iridescent dance partners waltzing without regard for gravity.  And then, my hand closes and you would gasp. It has caught a butterfly or a bird. No, you rub your eyes to realize that I have trapped an arrow. I have caught one mid-flight and it stares helplessly into my eyes that drain it now of its momentum. Then, with a single and certain blurred movement, you would see how I thread it into my own bow which now rises up. The string snaps and cascades of dew fall away from it like perspiration. There is a whistle and a breeze as air rushes to fill in a razor thin vacuum. As the unwilling arrow finds the eyes of its sender, you would believe in the myth of me.  

      Some would say these dreams should have been left in my youth.

      These fugues of the mind that I willingly embark upon,

      I should have shed them like skin I have outgrown.

      But they give me the strength to continue through the monotony. They reinforce my patience and rejuvenate the beauty in the gray. They help carry me down the path that I have chosen.

      For a few seconds each day, I am anything but who I am. I am significant, I am powerful, I am grand. These are the most perfect moments of my life. They are tenuous, they are fragile, but they are mine.

      And I guess I am telling you this because I just want someone to know. A secret only takes worth the moment it is whispered into another’s ear. I guess I would like someone to know when I am gone. I guess I would like someone to notice. I guess I want someone to hope for my return.

      So, if you look closely you can see it. It is happening even now. The slightest ease coming over the corners of my lips, near the ever-deepening lines carved into my face by time. Right there, see how they twist into the most subtle frame of a smile? That is how you will know I have left.

And I want you to miss me.

And I want you to be happy for me.

For I promise I will be back soon.

Digital

This boy I know.

He called me one night.

He told me such a story.

I couldn’t help but to laugh.

He is a sullen boy.

Always has been.

Nice but

Heavy.

We have talked before in the past.

For long periods of time

I guess I listen mostly

He just pours.

But I don’t see him much these days.

I guess he sort of disappeared.

I hadn’t really noticed, to be honest.

About that, I feel a little bad.

Until last night

My phone rang

It was 2, 3 even

His voice shook me awake

I had never heard him so alive before

I had never heard him so sure

I never heard him take a single breath

As he spilled out over the phone.

He told me that Pinocchio had it wrong.

To want to be real is madness.

This boy didn’t know how to be anymore.

His real limbs were so heavy. And so were his real thoughts.

Each morning he would leave his room with his shoulders high and his neck strong.

Each night he would crawl home, slowed by his own gravity.

Sometimes he would stop midstep, for a breath, for a dream.

Sometimes he would just sit wherever he stopped. And lower his eyes.

Until one day, he awoke and decided not to leave.

He woke up and just lay.

His unused legs felt no weight.

His untaxed lungs felt no suffocation.

He said the sun peaked and fell

And he did not move once

His eyes focused intently on nothing.

His ears tuned only to the slow beating of his heart.

On the third day, he said

He arose and shook the welcome disuse out of his muscle

And crossed the room to his desk

The glow of his computer welcomed him in

He sat down and began to click

The world appeared to him

It was there, in his email, in his pictures, in his messenger

The entire world inside of his room

Without a word, he was able to speak

Without a sound, he was able to listen

All there, all in a click.

All there, beneath his finger.

He tells me he periodically looked up

To watch the cars out his window

The streets were veins of light flowing around him

He was an untouched rock high above

With a click, he traveled the world

He fell in love and made love

With a click, he consumed

With another, he created.

Through that soft white window he gazed upon his family

His friends and his peers, they all looked back

He had the courage to speak to old loves

And the confidence to approach new ones

From his room where he was unseen,

He had never before been more noticed

His conversation had never come more freely

His insight never before so appreciated

And at his computer, he realized what he might do with the weight that remained

His pesky human emotions that wrecked him each day

With an endless dance of his fingers, he wrote them all down

They reflected from his pupils in black and white

With his fingers he folded himself into neat little files

That could be saved and stored

To be seen by another at a later time

That could be enjoyed at their convenience

And an amazing thing began to happen

Or so this boy I know said

The more he wrote himself into that screen

The flesh of his body began to disappear

His love and his hate, his passion and his hurt

All there, in digital form

A human being transformed to 1s and 0s, he says,

carries only the weight of electricity.

And so he was almost gone, he said

Shortly after I picked up the phone

There was not much left of him anymore

That was not flashing in zeros and ones

He just wanted to say goodbye to someone

To use his physical voice one last time

Before he became fully awake

Before he stopped being real

And then there was nothing

Except a hum and a tone

I called out his name

But I knew he was gone

I am sure it was just a joke

I am sure it’s quite insane

But I couldn’t help but to feel envy for what he believed

I want to believe he has escaped his weight.

And while I sit here now,

Two days since he called

I realize its two days since I have spoken

To anyone at all.

And I suddenly feel like I can say this one thing

Which has always been my greatest fear of all

Since the day I was born,

And until the day I am no more,

             I will always…. 1001010010 10 10011 101001110101010111101010110101010101

Clicking

I sat in my room today staring at my inbox.

Clicking

To see if anyone wrote me.

Clicking

To see if anyone remembered me.

I sit here still.

Clicking

Nothing.

Clicking.

Nothing.

I stare out at the hazy city stretching away from me, veins of light flowing around me without touching.

They are all out there not writing to me.

They are all out there not remembering me.

I suppose I could go find them.

I suppose I could walk right up to them and surely they would smile and wave and embrace me. 

I suppose I could go and remind them.

But I don’t want to get that close.

I’d rather sit here.

Clicking.

I’d rather sit here.

Nothing.